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                    Competition in the eBook Market by Tim O'Reilly</h2></td>
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                  <td width="680"><h5>There's been a lot of buzz on forward-looking publisher mailing lists in the past few days about Robert Darnton's piece in the New York Review of Books, Google and the Future of Books. When it hit techmeme today, I thought it might be appropriate to share more broadly the comments I made on the Reading 2.0 list (links added, minor edits):<br />
                      <br />
Darnton's piece is eloquent, insightful...and wrong. I loved his history of the idea of reading as a driver for the enlightenment and the dream of America, his evident love for the mission of the librarian, and his worried disdain for profiteers who limit that mission, but on the subject of the Google Book Search settlement stifling competition, he can't be paying attention to the fact that the electronic book marketplace is finally taking off!<br />
<br />
There has never been more competition either in electronic books, or for books, in the broader electronic &quot;republic of letters.&quot;<br />
<br />
It is true, perhaps, in the narrow sense, that no other party will be able to do a mass digitization project on the scale of Google's - but that was already true. The barrier has always been the willingness to spend a lot of money for little return; the settlement doesn't change that.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, the settlement provides absolutely no barrier to publishers providing their own digital copies, and this is in fact happening. At O'Reilly, we are selling digital copies of all our books through subscription services like Safari Books Online (which also includes thousands of books from other publishers), as direct downloads from our web site in pdf, mobi, and epub formats, and through emerging ebook channels like Amazon's Kindle, Stanza, and the iPhone app store.<br />
<br />
Safari is now O'Reilly's #2 channel, behind only Amazon. Meanwhile, in its first month of sales, our IPhone: The Missing Manual, released as a standalone iPhone app (really, a bundle with Stanza) reached sales levels that would have made it the #1 computer book, beating all print computer books reported by Bookscan in that same period.)<br />
<br />
In short, there's a strong economic motive for publishers to release digital editions of their books, and to treat Google Books as only one possible channel. If the revenues generated by GBS (via services enabled by the settlement) are significant, new titles will be released to that channel by publishers. But there's no reason why publishers will release their titles through GBS in despite of other possible channels. Google will have to prove its value, just like any other reseller.<br />
<br />
Frankly, I'd be far more worried about Darnton's wished-for utopia, in which the government had funded the equivalent, mandating that all publishers participate. That might well have nipped the competitive ebook landscape in the bud.<br />
<br />
As it is, we see lots of different competing approaches to bootstrapping this market. I'd say it's opening up very nicely!<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, the republic of letters, and the republic of ideas, has moved beyond books in substantial ways, into dialogs such as we have here, into blogs, onto web sites and other information services. It's alive and well! By the time I'm done, I imagine that my email correspondence and online writings would fill fifty volumes, just as did the physical letter writings of Franklin, Jefferson, Rousseau and Voltaire that Darnton rhapsodizes. If only my writings (and those of hundreds of millions of others) were so worth preserving!</span><br />
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